Buzz Feeder

Flipping bits, domain names, and the permanent you.

(These are some thoughts in response to Leo Laporte's late-night blog post about how a visibility bit, flipped to keep posts private, caused a week or two's worth of Leo's Buzz posts to flow unheard by the public. My feeling is that Leo's post isn't as much about Buzz specifically, as it is about audience, control, and our expectations of social networks in general. And those are interesting topics indeed. Update: We're tracking the root cause down now. Update 2: Found it.)

Now, I'm one of the biggest Google Buzz advocates around — I use it myself all the time — and even I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they replace their blog entirely with Buzz or any other tool.¹

I believe that, in a ideal environment, you should continue to publish content on your own domain, under your own namespace, under your own control. Ultimately, even the Googles and the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world ebb and flow and come and go, but a domain that you own is yours for life, and no one can ever take that away.

Perhaps you could publish content on a Wordpress or Blogger or Tumblr blog (either self-hosted, or on their service, white-labeled to your own domain) and feed it into Buzz.² Perhaps you could post it on Buzz and republish the Buzz content back on your own domain. But either way, the very best permanent handle on the web is still a domain name, not a '@username', a '/username', or a 'username.' on someone else's network.

Some companies appear to completely get this — tumblr.com and blogger.com both let you host your content on their servers and map it to your own domain for free. Others charge a premium for white-label domains, but the idea is that the content is yours, and the domain is yours, and you're the one who decides where it goes and how long it lives.

The trouble is, for the vast majority of people online, questions like these are the last thing they want to think about or deal with. Honestly, it's pretty amazing that non-technical people are tweeting and updating Facebook status messages at all, so it would be a huge and unrealistic leap to expect them to register a domain and publish content on a self-hosted blog.

Plus, the siloed platforms have plenty of advantages over self-hosting right now — things like @mentions and private/protected posts and following lists are relatively trivial to implement if the service owns the entire end-to-end. (And certainly the networks themselves hardly mind owning your name, so they have little incentive to fix it.)

Ultimately we need to lower the cost, and raise the utility, of user-centric creation and presentation of content, rather than the network-centric creation and presentation of content we have today.³ In an ideal world, you'd be able to use whatever tools you want, to produce whatever content you want, to publish in any place you want, to whatever audience you want.

In truth, we still have a long way to go before the federated model catches up. Though, thanks to Atom, AtomPub, Salmon, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub, etc. we're getting closer bit by bit every day. And as long as the status.net's and the cliqset.com's of the world are out there and fighting the good fight, I haven't personally given up hope, and I will continue to work on solving these problems myself with the resources I have available to me.

And to Leo — I'm sorry the last few weeks of your posts weren't set to "public". We'll definitely take a look to see if something else went wrong, and I hope that this was just a temporary hiccup, something that can be easily fixed. I know we'd all miss your contribution and participation over there; it just wouldn't be as fun without you around.

Update: Sounds like the symptoms of Leo's missing buzz (in the Gmail view) can be fixed by unfollowing him, then refollowing him again. That should help us narrow down the cause. Thanks to the readers of the live TWiT feed for pointing this out!

¹ I'm actually rather lax about this myself these days. The convenience of Buzz means that, for me, I often post updates directly into Buzz rather than remembering to hop over to another tool, and I still haven't written a script to mirror my Buzz content onto my own site.

² That's what I did for this post, which was written in Blogger, and will appear automatically on unto.net and then feed into Buzz.

³ One of the saddest things I heard recently was when a business development person at one of the well-known social networks described all of the posts that flow through their system as "their" content (meaning the network's content, not the user's). I strongly disagree with that sentiment, but it reflects the reality of how some companies feel about the people who use their tools. We should try and change that attitude.

From the Just-Because-I-Can-Dept

Buzzing in color, using Google buzz.

See also: Tweeting in Color From the Annotations Hackfest

: )

What a difference a decade makes …

From The Commercial Software Model, Craig Mundie, Microsoft Senior Vice President, May 3, 2001:

Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.

In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the .com business models that proved the least successful during the past year. They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the independent software sector. The business model for OSS may well be attractive for software as an adjunct to hardware the model of the 60s and 70s or for service businesses that do not generate the revenue needed for major investments in technology. But as history has shown, while this type of model may have a place, it isnt successful in building a mass market and making powerful, easy-to-use software broadly accessible to consumers.

From Microsoft Contributing More to OSS, Josh Holmes, Microsoft RIA Architect Evangelist, April 28, 2010:

I’m all excited – Microsoft has signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement. You can read about that on the official Joomla! blog – Microsoft signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement.

There’s a couple of fairly momentous things about that statement.

Obviously it means that Microsoft employees can contribute to Joomla!. That’s exciting all by itself as Joomla! is the second largest PHP application in the world. In fact, that’s already happened in conjunction with the signing as Ruslan Yakushev and Don Raman have already contributed code to add WinCache support to Joomla! Read all about the fantastic performance gains that you can get in Don’s post here.

However, the thing that’s really exciting to me is that what it means is that the Microsoft legal department has signed off on writing GPL’d code under the right circumstances. That’s awesome! It’s a clear demonstration of how far Microsoft has come in it’s commitment to OSS projects. Now, I’ve got my own issues with the GPL as I think that it strips the consumer of all of their rights but that’s for a different discussion.

At this point we have a ton of great OSS work going on.

This is, in fact, progress.

Call for Comments - OWF Patent & Copyright CLA

As a reminder, the public comment period on the Open Web Foundation Copyright Contributor License Agreement draft comes to a close on May 6th. We invite and encourage your feedback, as this document, a companion to the Open Web Foundation Agreement, will serve as a valuable tool for providing a license during the development phase while communities are working together to create specifications.

From David Rudin and Lawrence Rosen's introductory mail regarding the draft CLA and the request for comments:

Call for Comments

The OWF Legal Drafting Committee announces its publication of the draft OWF Copyright Contributor License Agreement ("Copyright CLA") for public comment. The public comment period will close May 6th. At that point, the Drafting Committee will consider and respond to all comments, and will refer a final version of the Copyright CLA to the OWF Board of Directors for final approval.

The Copyright CLA and FAQ are located at http://bit.ly/aHqb7H. To provide your comments to the FAQ and CLA, select the text you’re commenting on and click on the "add a comment" icon (looks like a small yellow post-it note) in the left hand column. We welcome your public feedback in that online forum.

Unlike the Open Web Foundation Agreement (“OWFa”), http://openwebfoundation.org/legal/, which applies to functional specifications after they reach a final state and are published, the Copyright CLA applies to copyrighted works you contribute to a specification while the specification is being developed. The Copyright CLA provides a license to your copyrights so that other contributors freely can include your contributions – and elaborate on them – in the community effort to develop the specification. It establishes terms and conditions for receiving and using written contributions to a functional specification. It also prepares the way for participants to sign the OWFa for the “final” specification.

This Copyright CLA will form the basis of a series of future CLAs. In particular, the OWF Legal Drafting Committee is now working on patent grants to be incorporated into the Copyright CLA to create a "Patent+Copyright CLA". Both CLAs are designed to lead to the same OWFa for final specifications.

If you wish to learn more about the work of the OWF Legal Drafting Committee or about the upcoming Patent+Copyright CLA, send email to either of the committee co-chairs listed below.

Thanks,

Lawrence Rosen
David Rudin

Open Web Foundation Legal Committee Co-Chairs

I've been heavily involved in the creation of these documents and I'm quite happy with the progress so far, and look forward to reviewing feedback from the community at large as we prepare these agreements for final review and publication.

I found the opt-out button.

[When I sat down to write last night, this post was originally going to be about the things I like about the F8 platform announcements. I'll still write that post later, because there are a lot of things to like. Edit: I wrote it.]

Like others, I deactivated my Facebook account tonight.

(Update: Apparently this is now a story, though I disagree strongly that this should be a story about where people work. Reducing it to that misses the point. And if you read the comments there, the vast majority of people, including some who are clearly quite tech savvy, still have no idea about the pre-approved data sharing facebook just enabled, and are confusing it with connect.)

Not for lack of trying, but I couldn't figure out exactly what personal information I was now sharing via Facebook, or with whom. I made a sincere effort to understand the privacy preference settings, and I thoroughly read the documentation, but even after a day it still remained unclear to me. And if it wasn't clear to me, just imagine how much sense it would make to the average Facebook user.

I find it troubling that Facebook's recent policy changes allow the company to share personal data with the sites you visit, and that this change was made unilaterally with no reasonable opportunity for the user to say no first. I say "no opportunity to say no first" both because it defaulted to "on", because it wasn't clear what was going to happen if you didn't disable it, and also because it was so difficult to figure out how to turn disable it if you wanted to. The average user will almost certainly not make the effort I did, nor will they even know they should.

(Update: Someone made the comparison with other networks, like AdSense or analytics. I wonder if that person understands the (I thought obvious) difference — that those programs don't share individual data directly with the publishers or advertisers. Besides, there's a very simple opt-out for that anyway.)

To get a sense of the user experience of someone trying to opt-out, please view the screenshots I posted of the experience last night.

You'll note that, even reading closely and taking the most reasonable path I could find, (and clicking far, far more pages into the flow than a normal user would), I still ended up on the wrong privacy page, and never ended up disabling the site sharing features I thought I did.

Digging deeper, I found more precise information in the relevant changes to the Facebook Privacy Policy. Specifically, in the new section that begins:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy. For example, these agreements include provisions relating to the access and deletion of your General Information, along with your ability to opt-out of the experience being offered. You can also remove any pre-approved website or application you have visited here [add link], or block all pre-approved websites and applications from getting your General Information when you visit them here [add link]. In addition, if you log out of Facebook before visiting a pre-approved application or website, it will not be able to access your information. You can see a complete list of pre-approved websites on our About Platform page.

The term General Information is defined as:

Connecting with an Application or Website. When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. We may also make information about the location of your computer or access device and your age available to applications and websites in order to help them implement appropriate security measures and control the distribution of age-appropriate content. If the application or website wants to access any other data, it will have to ask for your permission.

Unfortunately, the opt-out links in the first paragraph are broken. But more to the point, this should have been an opt-in to begin with, not an opt-out, given that the historical expectation on the network that profiles were private. (In fact, just a year ago, that profile data would have been private. An earlier policy change made certain profile data available to "everyone" by default. A cynic might suggest that now we know why.)

I'm actually all for public profiles, and for more sharing on the web. But the most important thing is transparency, and in giving users the ability to understand and control what is happening, all of which appear to have been rushed right past in the race to grow the network. The weird thing is, I might even have opted in, given a choice.

So for now, I'm deactivating the account altogether, in hopes that there will be a more clear policy in place someday, and better tools on the network to keep personal data personal and to understand when it isn't.

If you're curious, here's what the opt-out flow looks like, as found at:

http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php

In pictures: